Back in November 2012, I decided to read all of the winners of the BSFA Award for best Novel, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, now the Otherwise Award. I started with Non-stop, by Brian Aldiss, which was given a retrospective BSFA Award in 2008, and thought I had finished with Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer, which (rather surprisingly) won the Clarke Award last year.
It took me thirteen years, in the course of which the Tiptree Award renamed itself the Otherwise Award and then had a hiatus, and I myself was a Clarke Award judge twice and physically counted the BSFA Award votes several times. (I was also involved with Hugo administration for seven of the intervening Worldcons.) I flipped back and forth between reading the books one by one, and reading and reviewing all the books from one particular year in a single go. Links in this post are to this blog archive; more recent entries include purchase links at the end of each post.
In some years it was simpler because two or even three of the awards went to the same book. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, and Air, by Geoff Ryman, scooped all three. There have been several Clarke / BSFA doubles as well: Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland, The Separation by Christopher Priest, The City & the City, by China Miéville, and Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, the last of which also won both the Hugo and the Nebula.
I have learned that like everything, the awards go through phases. The BSFA gave the Best Novel Award to twenty-seven books by men before they chose one by a woman (The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell), and fourteen of the next fifteen winners were also by men (the exception is Ash, by Mary Gentle). Starting with 2013, however, the picture is more balanced, with seven winners by women and six by men – six different women, including two women of colour, and three different men. All the male winners so far have been white. Christopher Priest won it four times, Brian Aldiss, Ian McDonald and Adrian Tchaikovsky three times (so far); Ann Leckie is the only woman to have won twice. (Full list of winners and finalists on Wikipedia.)
The BSFA seems to be currently in a phase of recognising books which are less well known to the reading public. The Best Novel winners of the last two years have the fewest and third fewest number of owners on LibraryThing – 2024’s The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet McKenna with only 27, followed by 1987’s Gráinne, by Keith Roberts with 39 and then 2025’s Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley with 54. The top winner by LibraryThing ownership, perhaps not surprisingly, is Pyramids by Terry Pratchett, at 11,788, just ahead of Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke at 11,078. The Goodreads stats will no doubt have a slightly different ranking.
I think my favourite BSFA winner is Ash: A Secret History, by Mary Gentle, and of the ones I really like, the most obscure by LibraryThing ownership is The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod. The worst by my reckoning was The Ragged Astronauts, by Bob Shaw.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award has been going since 1987. It is decided by different judges each year; the panels have included the likes of Neil Gaiman, John Gribbin and, er, me. It’s therefore much more difficult to identify trends, since each year’s panel makes its own decisions. I count sixteen winners by women, twenty-one by men, and one by a non-binary writer, which is not too bad. Four winners, as far as I know, are by writers of colour, one woman and three men. Novels by China Miéville have won three times, by Pat Cadigan and Geoff Ryman twice. (List of winners and shortlisted novels on Wikipedia.)
The top Clarke winner by LibraryThing ownership is the very first, 1987’s The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, on a whopping 48,684, helped no doubt by its TV serialisation. Next are two others that were also adapted for television, 2015’s Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, on 14,175, and 2017’s The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, on 10,809. The one with fewest LibraryThing owners is 2018’s winner Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock, on 119, followed by the 2023 winner Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles, on 144.
My favourite is probably The Handmaid’s Tale, though I also think we made a very good call with Station Eleven. Both have turned out to be somewhat prophetic in different ways. At the more obscure end, I really liked Deep Wheel Orcadia. On the other hand, I thought the 2007 winner, Nova Swing by M. John Harrison, was unmemorable and uninteresting.
I had intended to compare the history of the BSFA, Clarke and Tiptree/Otherwise awards here. But I have discovered while drafting this that the Otherwise Award was presented to three novels and a short story last year, after a four-year hiatus, so I’m going to save my analysis of its history and my personal recommendations and disrecommendations until I’ve read the latest winners. It’s also a bit more difficult to assess, because it has gone to short fiction as well as novels. So, stand by. Meanwhile you can get Ash: A Secret History here and The Handmaid’s Tale here.
